Sathianathan Clarke, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and Ethics, United Theological College, Bangalore, India. This paper was presented in a less detailed and systematic
form at a national consultation on "Religious Liberty and Human
Rights" in Bangalore organized by the National Council of Churches of
India. It appeared as an article in the ecumenical review, Vol. 52, No. 4,
October 2000, p. 479-489 (World Council of Churches, 150 Route de Ferney, 1211
Geneva 2, Switzerland.) This version was prepared for Religion Online by Ted
& Winnie Brock.

India is not a nation but a complex secular
civilization. Its demography tells part of its impressive story. The 687.6
million Hindus of innumerable sects, 101.6 million Muslims (making India the
third largest Muslim-populated country), 19.6 million Christians, 6.3 million
Buddhists, 3.3 million Jams and 3.1 million people of other persuasions
(according to the 1991 census) reminds us of the many splendoured diversity of
our subcontinent (Rajeev Dhavan).

It was 5 a.m. on a Friday morning in Bangalore, India, many months ago. I
was awakened by the familiar call from the mosque across from our apartment: "Allah
0 Akbar" it cried out, to remind me that God is ruler of all. I had
begun to allow this call to remind me, a Christian, that God would be in
control of everything through that day. This Muslim message never disturbed me;
on the contrary, it made me religiously reflective and contemplative. But on
that morning the mosque had its competitors. The Christian church on my street
was having a convention. They wanted the community to be aware of their faith
affirmation too. A lyric screeched out from a conical loudspeaker: "Jesus
calls", it beckoned with much music and some noise. In a few moments the
local chapter of the Shahiri malai devotees (a popular Hindu movement)
joined in with their Bhajans (hymns of praise and devotion). They too
would not be left behind -- and it seemed that they had managed to hire the
most powerful amplifier. "Swami Sharanam Ayyappa" ("refuge
in you, Lord Ayyappa") they sang with gusto to the rhythmic thudding of
drums and clanging cymbals.

What had promised to be a strong though soothing call to remember the
Creator turned into a grating experience. The harmony of spirituality was
transformed into a cacophony because each religion sought to overpower the
other’s call. And then in my imagination I thought I heard another sound join
this cacophonous chorus of competing religions. The dogs in the street could
not resist howling in response to the divergent voices! Ironically, that which
claims to evoke the noblest in the human soul had, in practice, awakened the
most animalistic of instincts. In contemporary India religions are manifesting
a disturbing tendency to intimidate one another, and the public arena in all
its political, economic, social and cultural diversity is becoming the theatre
of these less-than-friendly encounters.

In this essay I deal with the public face of religion, particularly in the
interaction between Christianity and Hinduism, attempting to understand how
religion is "used" in the public domain in India. This involves
historical interpretation but I am primarily interested in discerning models of
interaction between different religious identities which have implications for
us in India far beyond the historical. I trace the manner in which colonialism
utilized religion to homogenize India, noting what emerges from the
colonialists’ encounter with India: the capacity to construct a unitary and grand
geo-political entity with an essential Hindu core. I also unpack the Christian
theological presuppositions influencing this imperialist agenda: Christ
incarnates into pluri-form reality in order to initiate the process of moving
towards one organic wholeness. Secondly, I link the nationalist movement with
colonialist ideology. Even if the nationalist awakening is understood as a
counter-movement against the imperialist mindset, it shared many of the,
philosophical tenets of its adversaries. And indeed, threads of this same
philosophy -- the unitary one overcoming the multivalent others -- informs and
directs the movement against religious liberty in contemporary India. Thirdly,
I argue for a model for understanding religious liberty that moves away from the
conquering propensity of the unitary one, in order to advocate for remembering
pluriformity. This argument presupposes that religion is a freely available
resource through which various communities symbolically represent their own
particularized identity. The right to be human thus also implies the liberty
to be religiously different, and thus difference is inscribed in these
religious identities -- even as they purport to emanate from the One Supreme
being.

Colonialism: The Monolithic One (Sell) taming/naming the Unruly/Unrulable
Many (Other)

Colonialism fabricated an "oriental other" to legitimate the
dominance of the Western self. Orientalism was, so to speak, the philosophy
that fuelled the colonial machine. With regard to the production of knowledge it
was driven by a twofold agenda: circulating forms of knowledge that
"proved" the passive, irrational, traditional, immoral, backward and
exotic nature of the Oriental (Eastern) world, and routinized the active,
rational, modern, moral, progressive and realistic nature of the Occidental
(Western) world. The logic of this body of knowledge implied that it was
natural and beneficial that the self (West) overcome the other (East) for the
sake of humanity’s progressive evolution. Thus this knowledge is integrally
intertwined with power: to colonize, to dominate, to educate, to covert, to
guide and control.

Of the myriad facets of this colonial construction, we will stress that the
production of the "Indian identity" involved a dual process. On the
one hand it construed an homogeneous identity which could "capture"
these varied and differentiated peoples; on the other, it posited an essence of
this constructed identity which could bind it together. In India this was done
by utilizing religion: the first objective was accomplished by construing India
as a unitary and homogeneous entity, religiously one; the second goal by
uncovering the fact that the essence of this religiousness was Hindu. Richard
King’s point is relevant: "Western Orientalist discourses, by virtue of
their privileged political status within ‘British India’, have contributed
greatly to the modern construction of ‘Hinduism’ as a single world
religion."

The colonial construction of India was intensely religious: the entire
region associated with being east of the Indus was taken to be one, captured
under the label "Hindu"; one region was construed to be one religion,
which in turn was constructed to be a religiously homogeneous identity with a
core essence. This tendency to locate the unity and the essence of India in
religion, that is, Hinduism, also aided imperialistic purposes. In the words of
David Ludden,

Equating non-European cultures with non-European
religions thus became a fixed cognitive routine in scholarship and colonial
policy. This enabled Europeans to justify imperial expansion in both religious
and secular terms: for Christians, European imperialism saved souls, and for
modernists, it brought progress into a world of backwardness and tradition.2

As an Indian Christian theologian, I cannot ignore the philosophical
commonalties between the world-view of the colonialists and the British
missionaries. Of course, one must not fall into the temptation of presenting a
tidy and watertight causal relationship between Christian missionaries and British
imperialists. This would simply misrepresent the diversity of goals held by the
various Christian mission agencies; gloss over the historical shifts in the
nature of relationships between the East India Company, the British empire and
the mission societies; and conceal the multiple ways in which local subjects --
the colonized Indians -- thought and acted within this context to demonstrate
their identity as independent agents.

And yet there were ways in which "imperial mission and missionary
imperialism" became inextricably intertwined.3 Through a
meticulous, comprehensive and multidisciplinary study Studdert-Kennedy
documents the similarity between themes of contemporary Western Christian
theology and the core beliefs which grounded politically the unfolding of the
imperial mission in India. While I am not willing to accept the one-dimensional
character which Studdert-Kennedy attributes to the imperialists in their
interaction with India (ironically, he buys into the "Oriental myth"
with the West as the active subject and the East as passive object), there is
much to be said for his connecting Protestant theology with the expansion of
the British empire.

Much more than the dualistic theological world-view of evangelical mission,
which tended to see the world in terms of the Christian God in combat against
the pagan gods, it was the liberal theological framework that tacitly
influenced the imperialist project. Certainly there were British missionaries
who believed that everything religious outside the Christian West needed to be
resisted and overcome. But the base of support of the expansionists of the
British empire in India did not come from them, rather it was influenced by a
more inclusive and liberal philosophical bent. This dominant theological paradigm
of British Christianity weaved together at least the following three themes,
which impacted the objectives and dynamics of British imperialism in India:
first, the immanental presence of God, through the incarnation of Christ, into
human history pervades all realms of life; thus the cosmic Christ unites all
human beings in an invisible whole. Second, this gathers up all of creation
into a natural, organic social structure which evolves towards order and
fulfillment. The immanental divine presence thus initiates trajectories of
coherence:

unity is stressed as the mark of divine work over the tendency towards
plurality, which would inject the spirit of disharmony. And thirdly, there is a
tacit assumption that the British empire embodies, under providential guidance,
the manifest process of such an historical evolution.

Thus, the mission of imperialism furthered the unfolding of the kingdom of
Christ over all God’s creation in a manner that fits with the overall purpose
of a capacious God. The following extract from the first report of the General
Wesleyan Methodist Society of 1818 expresses the theological dimensions of such
a mission theology:

For what are all the missionaries employed among
the millions even of British India? As men immortal and accountable, living in
the practice of idolatry, "that abominable thing which the Lord
hateth", they are objects of deep commiseration; but they have a special
claim to regard as fellow-subjects [all those] inhabiting portions of the
earth which Almighty God, in his providence has now made a part of the British
empire. The new and awful discoveries made of the polluting and murderous
nature of their superstitions, in writings of unquestioning authority, with the
success of the missionary labours of the excellent men of other denominations
already employed there, the committee think ought to be considered as special
calls upon British Christians to increase the means of acquainting their
natives of India with their divine religion; and to persevere in the glorious
toil, until the name of Christ shall be sounded throughout the vast extent of
our oriental dominion, and one God and Saviour shall be worshipped by every
subject of the British throne.4

Nationalism: self as Indian nation in the project of discipling the
errant others

Early Indian Nationalism

The nationalist agenda of the 19th and first half of the 20th century, which
arose to overcome colonialism, shares fully in the aspects of imperialism
discussed above. Breckenridge and van der Veer capture this overlap succinctly:
"Nationalism is not the answer to Orientalism as implied in Said’s book.
Rather nationalism is the avatar of Orientalism in the later colonial and
postcolonial period."5 A clear exposition of the influence of
Orientalism on nationalism is meticulously worked out by Gyan Prakash. It will
be best to quote him in full since it will help us understand the theoretical
framework that guides contemporary protagonists of Hindu nationalism, or
Hindutva:

The first significant challenge to this
Orientalized India came from nationalism and nationalist historiography, albeit
accompanied by a certain contradiction. While affirming the concept of an India
essentialized in relation to Europe, the nationalists transformed it from
passive to active, from dependant to sovereign, capable of relating to history
and reason. . .

The glorification of classical India as Hindu India
and of Hindu India as the originator of the modern India arose in response to
the dilemma that the nationalists faced. On the one hand they thought of India
as a nation-state in European terms -- as a cradle of reason, progress and
modernity. On the other hand, the assertion of nationhood demanded the
projection of a distance from Europe. . . Thus, the Hindu nationalists claimed
that the Vedic texts and ancient history had not only expressed India as a
nation but had also displayed attributes that colonialism defined as
exclusively European.6

Again the use of religion for the purposes of uniting the nation under the
"Indian" banner is quite obvious. Just as with Orientalism,
nationalism took over the project of construing India as a unitary and
homogeneous entity which was religiously one, and uncovered the fact that the
essence of this religiousness was Hindu. G. Aloysius does a remarkable
job of reconstructing historically this religious renaissance used for
nationalistic purposes:

Faced thus with the real and supposed onslaughts on
its monopolistic dominance, and haying tried different forms of meeting the
challenge, such as reform and revivalism, the Brahmmic ideology finally settled
upon an adequate strategy by reincarnating itself as pan-Indian
political-national Hinduism.

This group, as the dominant and leading class,
reworked and recast Brahminic ideology, from the vantage position of social
dominance, to suit the times as an ideology of state power, simultaneous to
their claim to appropriate the state itself. . . [Thus] the emergent Hinduism
was at once Brahminical as well as national.7

What I want to stress is the tendency in nationalism to tame all
heterogeneous and plural forms so they fit into the unitary construction of a
religiously-synthesized India, and how the core of this disciplined pan-Indian
identity is defined in Hindu (specifically Brahminic) terms.

It is pertinent to underscore the long native roots of this hegemonic form
of Brahminic religious synthesization of the dominant pan-Indian identity --
something in place well before the advent of Western colonialism. David
Scott suggests that dimensions of Orientalism involving the dual process of
valorizing the normative aspects of the Self (Brahminic) and denigrating the
differentiated aspects of the Other (Dalits, tribals and foreigners) were
extant well before the colonial enterprise in South Asia. By analyzing the
power operating in pre-colonial discourse, specifically by means of the
monopoly of Sanskrit knowledge and its dominance in interpreting the Dharmic
law, Scott makes us aware of the local and autochthonous roots of Orientalism
in India’s past.8

In a recent reconstructive essay on Hinduism, Sudhanshu Ranade suggests a
connection between the not-so-noble function of "the political branch of
Hinduism" in Vedic times, and "the trap the BJP is leading us into
today".9 This involves the task of consolidating a
hierarchically-ordered socio-political structure for Hindu society reflecting
true religious Dhanna and controlling these classes/castes in order "to
keep people in their place [so as] to keep them from getting above
themselves".10 Perhaps this is the reason that nationalism, in
its Orientalist form, is so pervasive in contemporary India. With these
transitional comments let us look at the contemporary situation in some detail.

Contemporary Hindu Nationalism

Nothing can be more alarming than the resurgence of the Hindu nationalism
today, but it is hardly unexpected since it is the contextual manifestation of
the colonialism and Indian nationalism which I have just traced. It is complex
because it has many context- and regional-specific expressions. And yet the
definition of a nationalist suggested by Andre Beteille is general enough:
"A nationalist, in the ideological sense, is someone who seeks to
subordinate every attachment and every loyalty to attachment and loyalty to the
nation, for himself [sic] and for all others." So far things seem
innocuous; the Hindu nationalist, however, goes further by building on the
train of thought worked out by the colonialist and the Indian nationalist,
namely identifying being Indian with being Hindu.

Thus the Hindu nationalist is someone who, through fostering the myth of
internal and external threat to national stability and security, places maximum
moral value on affirming that India’s core consists of the eternal Hindu tenets
(loyalty) and defending these with the conviction and zeal of patriotic duty to
the country (attachment). Let us now outline two general strands of Hindu
nationalism, or Hindutva.

The disciplining left hand of Hindu nationalism: ideological and physical
violence

The left hand of Hindu nationalism is virulently ideological even as it
unleashes cruel physical violence. The pen and the stick work in concert. On
the one hand is a move to promote ideological discipline by undercutting the
possibility for religious and cultural difference. Culture, religion, language
and nation are one, and this commonness of being Hindu-Indian must be espoused
even if one wants to be secular. According to Jayant Lele, it is this form of
"pedagogic violence" that drives the current situation: "The
proponents of Hindutva want to appropriate the same syncretism as a property of
Hinduism and are thus able to assert that India is secular because it is
Hindu."12 Thus Arun Shourie in two recent books displaces the
authentic identity of Indian Christians who have chosen not to belong to the
hierarchical Brahminical Hinduism,13 and disparages the movement of
Ambedkarism, which consciously unites Dalits to stand against the Hindu
nationalist conception of a "free India".14

Shourie in his attempt to reconstruct a united, Hindu India fails to respect
the will of communities who want to be part of the nation, but not confined to
its hierarchical Hindu idea of a community under the principle of the varnasramadharma.
One cannot but be struck by the concerted attempts of the nationalists to
demonize communities that assert their cultural and religious difference in the
face of Hindu nationalistic forces.

On the other hand, the disciplining left hand of Hindu nationalism also
metes out punishment to those who rebuff its prescriptive guidance. One must
point to the many instances of violence unleashed on those communities that
resist the pan-Hindu identity; let us take again the Dalits and Christian
minorities as examples. In a methodical and widely-researched monograph, Human
Rights Watch documents the increasing violence directed against Dalits:
"Between 1994 and 1996, a total of 98,349 cases were registered with the
police nation-wide as crimes against scheduled castes. Of these, 38,483 were
registered under the Atrocities Act. A further 1660 were for murder, 2814 for
rape, and 13,671 for hurt."15 It goes on to give a frightening
picture of the rise in recent mass murders in Bihar and Tamilnadu. With regard to
the Christian community T.K. Oommen purports that "there has been
unprecedented violence against them in the last one year." He elaborates
further: "It is not true that there was no anti-Christian violence in the
past. But [incidents] were few and far between. In the last fifty years there
have been only fifty instances of physical violence against Christians. But in
the last one year there have been 110 cases of atrocities against them."16

The disciplining right hand of Hindu nationalism: coercive mechanisms of
Indian-Hindu integration

There has also been an attempt to Hinduize all segments of the nation so as
to forge a unitary consciousness at its heart. This requires restoring the
essentialized identity of being Hindu-Indian which was somehow lost through
capture (colonialism), captivation (conversion) and rebellion (Dalits and
Tribals). Disciplining of the masses to be followers of the original way of
life as embodied by Hinduism is the agenda of this right hand of Hindu
nationalism. The proposal in October 1998 by a commission on educational
experts is a stark example of this objective to Hinduize all of India. In a
comprehensive plan to restructure education the commission suggests that the
government introduce Sanskrit as a compulsory subject in schools" in order
that "the primary to the highest education should be Indianized,
nationalized and spiritualized".’7

It further adds that since "Hindutva is a way of life and not a
religion . . . India’s invaluable heritage of the Vedas and the Upanishads should
find a place in the curriculum from primary to the higher level courses,
including the vocational courses."18

In The Hindu (13 July 1999) C.V. Narasimhan provocatively justifies
the coming together of the mother-tongue, the mother-land and the mother-religion
in Hinduism.19 While I wholeheartedly affirm the necessary and
positive role that Hinduism can and ought to play in nation-building, the
notion that the land, language and religion of India can be viewed as coming
under the "motherhood" of one monolithic label is dangerous and
unacceptable. Indeed, this Parent-India has many nurturing cultural, linguistic
and religious mothers!

Local resources for remembering pluriformity

What vigilant and beneficial response can uphold the human right to be
religiously different in India? For something concrete and positive must be
done to support the forces resisting the Hindutva phenomenon! The first aspect
of a helpful response has to do with what ought not be done. In seeking
a solution to this unitary, exclusive and hegemonic ideology one must be
careful to repudiate it as a paradigm. The general temptation, after all, is to
fight one form of exclusivism with another form of the same, leading to a
situation of competing fundamentalist or essentialist paradigms.

Particularly in situations of social conflict and political uncertainty
people opt for elementary, facile and unequivocal categories. The need of the
hour is to get out of the colonial and national models which sanction the
rejection of a plurality of religious expressions. Only then can one embrace an
alternate model which empowers all religions to live out their difference,
while holding the variety of human communities’ self-expressions within a
humane framework. In order to be relevant let me be concrete. What does this
rejection of the colonialists’ and nationalists’ paradigm mean for the
world-view of Christian communities?

For Christian communities, rejecting the Hindutva philosophical framework
means being careful not to buy into its presuppositions. It means being
suspicious of using the same essentialist and exclusivist model that valorizes
any one religion at the expense of others. In the case of Christians it means
becoming self-reflective, and self-critical, of the possible imperialistic
objectives of mission. The mandate to make every Indian a Christian in a fixed
period of time, working in collaboration with Christian communal or Christian
international networks and involving colossal financial and social resources
(including knowledge systems and technological capacities), arises from the
same unitary, exclusive, and hegemonic paradigm of cultural and religious
monopoly advocated by Indian and Hindu nationalism. In terms of conceptual
models, there seems to be little difference between wanting to reconvert all
Indians into Hindus and seeking to convert all Indians into Christians.
"India for Christ by 2000" has now been proved to be nothing but a
simplistic slogan. "India for Christ by 2100" seems akin to the
world-view of Hindutva because it refuses to respect the plurality of religious
experiences and expressions.

Of course, the practical difference cannot be ignored: Hindus are an
overwhelming majority closely associated with political, economic and social
power while Christians are less than 3 percent of the population without any
realistic chance of economic and political influence at a national level. Quite
aware of this vulnerability, and fully affirming that the Hindutva agenda must
be subverted, what I am calling for is an internal debate within Christianity
about the objective and implementation of mission activity within a pluralistic
world-view. Monolithic models are always hazardous to the survival of the
"other" in its divergent forms, and must be resisted -- irrespective of
which religion or culture is asserting itself as the "Self".

I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not
advancing the notion that conversion from one religion to another must be
banned in India. Indeed that, too, is a human right protected by the Indian
constitution.20 However any model that undercuts the plural forms of
being religiously and culturally human disrespects the right of human beings to
be different. And Indian history suggests that when this unitary, exclusive and
hegemonic model is institutionalized it is both threatening to the human right
to be religiously different, and destructive of the secular, that is,
non-religious, character of the nation-state which is guaranteed in the
constitution.

A second consequence has to do with garnering more
pluralistic frameworks for harnessing the diversity of religious expressions in
our communities. The onus is on cultural and religious communities which
experience and assert their cardinal differences from the Hindutva ideology to
promote world-views more amiable to plurality and less hostile to difference.
Such models, I believe, are extant in local Indian communities; they just need
to be recognized as worthwhile paradigms for collective human living.

Let me share an experience from a Dalit Christian
community which exhibits traces of such a heterogeneous model. When I served as
a rural priest in Tamilnadu in the 1980s I was intrigued to discover how many
Dalit Christian communities wanted their native Dalit religious rites and
Christian rites to co-exist. This was particularly evident at funeral
ceremonies. For example, while I led the funeral procession from the house of
the deceased to the burial ground -- dressed in the traditional attire of the
local Christian priest, and accompanied by a band of church members singing
Christian lyrics -- there was a group of Dalit leaders, sometimes accompanied
by a group of drummers, fulfilling the native Dalit ritualistic requirements.
Usually this would involve throwing coins and rice on the processional path and
offering sacrifices of limes (in one case a chick) at the cross roads that mark
the boundaries between the colony and the outside world, and the outside world
and the funeral ground.

Of course they kept me, as the representative of
the Christian faith, far away from the goings on of their native religious
customs, apparently assuming that I would not be able to comprehend their dual
religious participation. Certainly "syncretism" -- and there are many
different, sometimes contradictory, understandings of the term -- is still
considered heretical in most Christian circles; and yet there is clearly a need
to reexamine this complex issue. Those who study Indian religions will affirm
that this ability of local communities to participate in more than one
religious tradition is not unique to Dalit Christians! Thus it is paradoxical,
and ironic, that the exclusive, unitary and homogenizing ideology of Hindutva
is gaining disciples. Why is this? And is not the time ripe to harvest the
living local models of "multiple religious participation" (John H.
Burthrong) found among our indigenous communities? Could this not offer
alternatives to the Hindutva model?

I am well aware that this discussion could be
dismissed as the same old "relativistic muddle" of an ambiguous
pluralist. This would be quite incorrect, and to make this clear I offer two
qualifications. First, I am not offering a prescriptive model but rather
looking for resources to deal with the present predicament in India from the
actual lived realities of specific communities. In particular, I am suggesting
that Dalit Christian communities may offer living examples of ways to cope with
pluralistic challenges and possibilities. Second, it must be quite clear that
participating in more than one religio-cultural tradition does not mean an
opportunistic putting together of a featureless mass of religious resources. It
should be noted that most local religious world-views have a primary and a
secondary structure. Religious conversion occurs when the primary structure is
exchanged for another primary structure; when the secondary structure is
exchanged for another secondary structure this is, rather, an internal
enrichment, within a continuing faith commitment, for fuller human
self-expression. In both of these processes there is an inevitable element of
co-mingling and transmutation; as the Roman Catholic scholar Robert Schreiter
has compellingly argued, syncretism and synthesis are not unrelated, but share
common structures and processes.21

Thus an assertion of the right to be religiously human, which involves
choosing, transforming and inhabiting the world of "my" or
"our" religion in accordance with "my" or "our"
changing experiences, plays an important role in forming local religious identity.
It is not as though communities participate indiscriminately in dual, or
multiple, religious traditions. In India many religious communities live
abundantly from their own particular religious heritage, while also living
partially, but intently, from the richness of another or other religious
tradition(s). Others’ religions are not to be feared or overthrown; they can
form temporary "spaces" of hospitality and nurture.

A metaphor for pluralistic living

By way of conclusion let me play with a contextual metaphor which comes from
this discussion of multiple religious participation. Consider a model for the
pluralistic living of various religious communities along the lines of a large,
traditional, rural household in India. Many families from one lineage live in
this large ancestral house, each with their own appointed portion. The house is
rectangular, with many well-designed portions to accommodate many nuclear
families from the same lineage. In their own portion of the house the members
of each nuclear family live in autonomy and security. They evolve their own
rites, relational patterns, language and social practices. There is much
freedom for creative and contextual symbolic expression. These expressions,
however, must not contravene the fundamental values and practices of the
lineage.

Two common areas bring all members of the household together. First, there
is a large, open foyer which leads into a corridor linking each of the portions
with the front entrance. This foyer, along with the corridor, is used as a
space for social interaction with each other and for entertainment of common
visiting friends and relatives. Second, there is an opening at the back of each
portion which leads into a common play area. This area, which is secured from
the outer world, is where intimate intra-rela-tionships happen between various
members of the lineage. Children can play here safely, and various common
facilities are shared to meet the needs of the larger family. Some basic rules,
worked out among all families, must govern relationships with the aim of
guarding the autonomy and security of each family unit, and enhancing the
welfare and honour of the lineage as a whole

This metaphor emphasizes that the autonomy and security of each community’s
religious experience and expression must be guarded by all members of the
extended family, and that the interaction within the common spaces of the house
must be governed by mutually agreed codes of conduct allowing for free exchange
of ideas and not leading to the theological "annexing" of one unit by
another. Succession from the lineage is strongly discouraged; but so are
homogenization and hegemonization within the lineage.

Summary and Conclusion

Contemporary India, then, is experiencing a systematic attack against
various expressions of religious and cultural plurality. The move to project
and promote a nation which is unitary by way of its common Hinduness is gaining
ground. I have argued here that the ideological model of a monolithic and
homogenized India, which fueled the Indian national movement and still fuels
contemporary Hindu nationalism, is an extension of Western colonialism. Thus
instead of countering the colonial framework, the nationalists appropriated it.
This may have been helpful in galvanizing all communities to oppose colonial
rule and achieve together Indian independence, but this same unitary and
homogenizing ideology has been quite destructive in the hands of present-day
Hindu nationalists. Their agenda disciplines both those who stray from the core
of the Indian-Hindu value system, and all those others who must be enlightened
by "eternal truth" and be reintegrated into the organic -- but highly
hierarchical -- Hindu dharma considered binding on all Indians.

Christian mission -- however it is understood and whatever form it may take
-- must not adopt the ideology of the colonialists, as the Hindu nationalists
have done. It will be most true to its Lord by proclaiming the gospel
confidently, but in a way that respects the human right to be religiously
different.

17 "Joshi Agenda: Sanskrit -- Must in All
Schools", in The Asian Age, 17 October 1998, p.1. Ibid., p.2.

18CV. Narasimhan, "The Relevance of
Religion", iii The Hindu, 13 July 1999, p121.

20 The Indian constitution guarantees both the
right to "profess and practice" religion and the right to
"propagate religion".

21 Robert J. Schreiter, The New Catholicity:
Theology between the Global and the Local, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis, 1999. He
makes the point that "structurally, syncretism and synthesis are not
different from each other". Further he opines that "[a] pronouncement
of syncretism has been all too often a way of stopping conversation, of judging
the outcome without attending to the process. In that sense all change is
syncretic and aims at being synthetic" (p.82). See also his earlier work, Constructing
Local Theologies, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis, 1985.